Germanrazor

Anyone using a smart watch for monitoring HR and VO2 on rides? I am looking to the new yet to be released Casio G-SHOCK GBD-H1000 or even a Garmin model if I can find one that gets great ratings in reliability.

Just checking to see what other cyclist are using to monitor daily HR and other key functions of daily health on and off the bike.

unterhausen

I have a vivoactive 3, so no VO2. Wrist isn't the best for that measurement anyway, but I guess a measurement is better than no measurement. I like it. Mostly use it to track swimming, don't bother with cycling. The battery life has been pretty good, and it charges up quickly

Tourist in MSN

I use a cheap heart rate monitor that has no extra bells or whistles. Uses a chest strap. I don't have heart problems, but some times on tall steep hills I have noticed that my heart rate had climbed above where I wanted it to be so I use it the same way that I use the tachometer on an engine, I like to know how fast the engine is turning over.

I used several from Sports Instruments (now a defunct company) that died from water getting in them. Have bought a Sigma one since then, been quite happy with it. I leave it on my bike, after five weeks of rain last summer on a bike tour, water never got into it so I am sold on it.
https://www.amazon.com/Sigma-Sport-2...3WF/ref=sr_1_1

This one only gives you a number for your current rate, no averages, no calories, etc, no blue tooth, no latitude and longitude, it just gives me what I want to know.

Seattle Forrest

​​​​​​I got hit by a car going 35 to 40 and had my (Garmin) Fenix 3 on at the time. Watch hit the car's hood pretty hard. Not a scratch, everything worked as well after the accident as before. I was in the hospital until the following day. I think that's pretty reliable.

You need a power meter for VO2max, it works by comparing your HR vs watts.

atwl77

Yes, and because it compares HR with watts, it can be fooled. My HR is typically lower when doing low cadence work so doing 180W at 50rpm is going to make it think I have a better VO2Max than if doing 180W at 100rpm.

Germanrazor

Thanks for the replies......after more research online and going back and forth on what is to come and what's on the market now I decided to go with a Garmin smart watch. I actually found a great deal on a new but older Vivoactive 3 which has most of what I could want. I thought about the Vivoactive 4 but saved twice the money. I can even pair the wrist HR with my Xplova X5 Evo cycling computer. I know a wrist HR monitor is not the most accurate but neither is a chest strap over actual physical taking of your HR. I used a Garmin chest strap for years on my Garmin cycling computer and would at times get erroneous readings too.

All in all this watch will allow me to do other activities and should serve me well. Plus the price was much better than $300+ for a Venu or Vivoactive 4 which were the others I closely looked at. I wanted to keep my purchase under $250 if I could and I beat that by far.

VC CYCLE

The HR monitor is not medical type that it is hard to be really accurate. But normally it can serve well for sports.

Germanrazor

Of course not. But it does beat not having anything during a ride to give you some gauge to go by. Just like a gun with a faulty dialed in scope......ain't worth much for accuracy but still is a good deterrent for a burglar still.

I had to send back my first Garmin watch as it ceased to properly or at all work certain functions. However, the replacement has been great and what one would expect. I do like the fact it will sync with my biking computer so the HR will transmit and I can run concurrent the cycling app on the watch to gauge it to the cycling computer to get and idea of the difference.

Overall I am happy with the watch as it also has a widget for aviation weather reports (METARS & TAFS) that I use in my job.

ChrisAlbertson

Just picture what this would be like. You are climbing a hill and HR is in zone-5 at 180 BPM and maybe you are out of the sadle and now to see the HR you nee to take one hand off the hadle bar and tilt your wrist. That scenario just does not work

Wrist mounted HR monitor work fine when you are just cruising along on flat roads. I have both and even ride with both but I was out just yesterday riding up a hill and coasting down then back up doing hill cycles. I wanted to let HR fall to below 100 before I stared and but limit it to what I can do for five minutes on the way up. This type of thing is near impossible to do on a public roadway with cars using a wristwatch.

On the other hand when on the beach bike path riding casually I can even work the buttons on the watch and change the display but I'd be nuts to try this on the downhill at 30 MPH with both cars and potholes on the road and I can't move my hands on the uphill.

Then one more BIG point is that all wrist mounted HR sensors are not very good. They never will be either because there is not any deep tissue in the wrist so the sensor has to "dig out" the data by averaging over many pulses. The chest strap will always give better data as will those upper arm bands that go over the biceps.

It is better to have a large-type BIG number that is always visible even with both hands on the drops and this big number is connected to a high-quality HR sensor on the upper arm or chest. My watch is only usable in totally non-challaging times. Watches are best for running or hikers or very casual bike rides.

Seattle Forrest

Why do you need to know your heart rate when you're going 30 mph down a hill?

ChrisAlbertson

I don't normally do that. but the goal was to do some interval training and I read that a good measure of fitness is how quickly your HR drops back to normal. I'm not quite fit yet but the way to get there is to ride up a hill for 5 minutes then go back down in 2 and then back up. They say to wait until HR goes down before doing the next interval. So I watched HR recovery on the downhills.

Also, it is easy to do when there is a big number right there on the handle bar. I set up the Garmin computer with HR and timer. I've hit a performance wall and I think I'll do intervals once a week


I used to use my watch to monitor HR but (1) watches all lag and don't track HR well. They tend to do a lot of averaging and (2) I have to take a hand off the bar or even push a button to read the HR on the watch.

The cheapest ANT+ bike computer that can display camden, HR and so on is only $49 (Wahoo Element) or $140 for an eBay Garmin Edge120 Or buy a used iPhone 5 for like $10 and zip tie it to the handle bar. I actually did this for a while with an old junk-phone. It can cost nearly nothing to have a display you can read hands free.

Rob_E

I think it depends on why you are using it. I agree that a wrist mounted display of your heart rate would be tricky to use while at the height of your workout. I don't really track my heart rate at all, but I have thought about implementing it for diet/exercise/tracking purposes. Right now I just track my ride length and duration, and I let the tracking software provide an estimate of how many calories I've burned during my ride. It's worked fine, but tracking the heart rate seems like it might provide a another point of data to make the estimates more reliable. I wouldn't need to monitor my heart rate while I'm riding. It would just be another data point. On the other hand, I currently track my rides using my phone, which is mounted on my handlebars. I could display any of my ride stats while I was riding, including heart rate data, whether it was tracking that data via my watch or something else.

I can definitely see why you don't want to be looking at your wrist all the time for that data, but there are use cases for tracking your heart rate without needing to look at your wrist to get the numbers.

Marcus_Ti

To know how much your heart rate leaped when you had to grab the brakes to not hit that _________ that went in front of you?